


Progression

by TwoCatsTailoring



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Implied Ship, Retrospective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 01:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3189920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwoCatsTailoring/pseuds/TwoCatsTailoring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After years of being gone, Rude gets the chance to go back home. But going back is never easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Progression

There was hesitation there. Hesitation that he did not expect to have to overcome after so long away. Eight years he had been gone from this place, not a shred of contact with the people who had raised him, made him in to the man that he was today.

No, no that wasn’t right at all. They had no hand in the man that stood at the back door of the best hotel in all of Costa del Sol with his gloved hand hovering over the knob as if this was not his home.

This was not his home thought because he was not the same person he’d been eight years and a lifetime ago. When he’d left not because he wanted to but because the woman, the force behind all of this had told him to go. 

_Where there is life there is hope._

She’d said that to him, spine of steel never bowing, her eyes still dry though her voice was choked. If he went, they both lived. For a while at least, and as long as there was life still, then there was hope for something better.

He’d not improved. Not in the way that he supposed most mother’s wanted their children to improve. He’d left rough around the edges but honest, quiet and dedicated to helping others. Now he was ruthless, cold and calculating, more deaths than lives in his hands.

It played back, hindsight offering a perspective that he had never thought about before. The progression from anger and resentment burning through his tongue and earning him the attitude-cum-name that he owned more now than the one on his official documentation, to the collapsing inwards, months of dark silence as he trained followed by more months of as few words as possible as he got through the ‘rookie’ stage. 

He knew now how lucky he had been, his size and newly-constant frown communicating very clearly to everyone around him that he was not someone to haze or prank in the usual ways of Turks. The demand for distance and avoidance as unspoken as everything else he never said.

Acceptance, plodding forward, head down, following orders, never rocking the boat. Learning what was put before him to learn and discovering that the same hands his biology profession had told him would help him go far in surgery also helped him excel at building bombs. Finally, there was something he could take some level of pride in, if he just ignored the fact that they were being used to kill, not just those who stood against ShinRa but also ordinary citizens who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the introduction of Reno (goddess help them all) about eight months in, things had picked up and stayed consistently busy. Of course they had tried pairing Rude with other Turks. Some worked out well, others did not. Honestly, most did not but Reno, whom everyone found annoying, was actually relaxing to Rude.

He didn’t have to keep up a conversation, for one. And the guy was efficient, no lolly-gagging around. He didn’t talk about the missions after, either and that, more than anything else, helped Rude begin - just begin - to detach himself from the job.

Kill a pair of hookers who were selling information, go for a burger and beer. Interrogate a Wutaiian general, go pester a Honey Bee. There were lines drawn, very clear, between being on-duty and being off. Don’t mix business with pleasure was the order of the day and it was one that Rude was able, before many months had passed, to follow without thinking.

It was when he forgot that things became difficult. Let her get close. Find out what AVALANCHE was doing. All in a days work. But Chelsea was smart, tough as nails, and more beautiful than a winter sunrise. She spoke her mind, teased him, and never let him win at poker. She had him tongue-tied and head over heels in love with her before he knew what he was doing.

Face off against the terrorists by day, date one of them by night. He knew it wouldn’t last, he knew. From the beginning and he worked hard to cover up the hurt of her walking away. He tried to be angry but he wasn’t. How could he be when he understood why she’d done it?

The realization that he’d probably built the bomb that would have killed her, or had some hand in her death - because there was no way she could have survived the annihilation of the first and best (yes, best. they were formidable foes.) AVALANCHE - had broken something. He could almost hear it when it happened, like struts snapping out from under a bridge, cables breaking under the tension. 

If Reno had been ten minutes later….

That didn’t bear thinking about and the results were clear. He stopped right then. Stopped caring, stopped thinking, stopped feeling for a long time. He cared about nothing, stopped at nothing, did his job as if it were the only reason to be alive - and it was, because he felt alive if he was busy doing just about anything. He moved forward, one running pace in front of the other, taking whatever came his way be it alcohol, drugs, women, gambling. Whatever it was he would do it provided that it offered up a thrill.

Because the thrill was what made him feel human. The risk, the danger, the off chance that he could be hurt or killed in whatever he was doing was how he connected with his own humanity, his own frailty. 

It was Nibelheim that woke him up. The stench of burnt flesh and mako, wet wood and ash-filled air. The acts of delivering bodies and survivors to Hojo there at the mansion. The random flames that would flare up for days after, then razing the whole town only to direct the cleanup and rebuilding. Interviewing people to bring the place back to life. understanding that this was being done to cover up the horror of it and protect ShinRa’s image. 

He’d realized too, right about then, that ShinRa had problems. Big ones, from the inside out and he had to applaud Veld for keeping the Turks somewhat independent of the bubbling cesspool. They’d all seen it coming then, and started to plan for it, things getting badly derailed, confusing and more dangerous than even he could stomach as ShinRa turned against them.

As if it could. But that was when he learned that there was nothing worth giving your life for but yourself. He would not die on the alter of ShinRa or pride. He would not be executed without taking a whole lot of people with him, the President first of all. He’d had it planned, perfectly, calculated out in his mind what he would need, where he could get it based on where he was and the amount of time he would have to arrange to be bought in order for him to get everything in place. It was a perfect plan, all it needed was the order to come down.

But fate spared him again, just as he was ready, at long last, to die not for a cause but for himself and himself alone. Lady Luck intervened and his life moved forward at a new, fevered, breakneck pace. There was no letting up, no stopping for what felt like years of movement, chaos, panic, and destruction. But they four, Tseng, Reno, and now Elena even, so new but no stranger, had slipped through somehow. Still standing, still upright and now the tables had turned. 

The clock had struck midnight. Out with the old, in with the new. He owed Rufus ShinRa for keeping him alive, but he’d been offered this chance. This chance that he was hesitating in taking now, knowing that the difference between the man who had left here and the man who was returning was going to be difficult, perhaps painful for the mother who had loved him, raised him to be good and credible and open and kind. Who had yelled at him about integrity and keeping your word. 

The difference was in the tee shirt and jeans that he had left in and the black suit and sunglasses he was coming home in. Home? Was this home? With the salt air and the smell of lemongrass and hibiscus on the wind? Was this home anymore?

His hand withdrew from the door. Maybe not. Maybe this wasn’t the right thing to do. How he wanted to, but what did he have to offer up to the people here? What did he have to give to his mother other than a lying murderer who cut a fine figure in a black suit?

The option was taken from him as the very woman he did not want to disappoint flung open the door, calling back behind her some instruction as she lifted a cigarette to her lips and collided with him.

Automatically began to apologize.

Then stood stock still, staring up at him with an unreadable expression on her face for a full minute before she was able to speak, her voice barely above whisper and her eyes starting to shine in the filtered kitchen light.

"You’re alive. Thank Shiva, you are alive!"


End file.
